gardening

I was at a Christmas party in conversation with a local engineer who, hearing I design food forests, wanted to pick my brain on apple trees. He had six trees in two rows of three, well spaced in his backyard. He was throwing out terms about the mainstream organic sprays he was using, and framed his questions expecting me to know some super organic spray, or spray regimen, that would fix his problems of pests and low vigor in general. I don’t think he expected the answer I gave: ‘What’s planted around the trees?’

We often think of the rules of spacing as rules for keeping other plants away from each other. In practice I find the lines blur between species, and enters a much more broad science: it’s what should be included near the plant, as well as what shouldn’t. Between these two aspects, you make or break the majority of fruit tree problems.

The lines often blur between species because, let’s face it, plants don’t grow in a vacuum and always have something growing up against them. In this guy’s case, his trees were planted right into his lawn. They were in competition with the grass.

Looking at their history, grass and trees are in most cases nemesis of one another. Trees make forest; but grass needs open space. The setting in most yards of trees with grass between is quite artificial, and only exists because we keep the grass mowed. In any other situation, trees would take over.

The prairies are the kingdom of grass, and these occured because of rain shadows, or areas where circumstances such as the Rocky Mountain range messed with the winds that carry rain, creating droughts in one part of the year, and near flooding in another. Trees don’t like that, because most have relatively shallow roots, as much as 80 percent residing in the top three feet of soil depending on the kind and its conditions; but prairie plants, such as the grasses, and Nitrogen fixers like Senna hebecarpa, put roots down unusually deep, so reach the water table whether rain comes or not.

An experiment showing the root growth of Red Delicious apple tree two years after planting.

Have you ever wondered as you pass woods how the trees survive so close? If you were planting an oak tree in your yard that would someday reach a hundred foot tall, can you imagine the spacing recommendations? They would be over fifty feet apart. Most yards couldn’t fit more than one tree. But in the woods they stand on top of each other, growing for hundreds of years, happy, and healthy.

Studies have shown that trees can grow their roots deep into the ground, but prefer to keep their roots higher in the soil if possible. There is more organic matter, hence nutrients and water, in this layer. If there isn’t, trees will try to put in the work to grow deeper. This is a lot more work, and certainly isn’t their first choice.

What trees really prefer is building networks in which they share and preserve resources. For instance, trees have what is called hydraulic redistibution, which is a fancy term for moving water not only up for their own use, but back down into the soil for storage, and horizontally to other plants. Peter Wholleben, in his book The Hidden Life of Trees recalls his surprise when he found a ring of roots from a beech tree that must have been cut down well over a century beforehand, but still had green, living roots showing above ground. It had no leaves, and the stump was gone. As he explained, citing various studies, the living trees around this ancient (should be dead) tree were feeding it sugars made in their leaves, keeping it alive. Likely, they got some kind of kickback from the extended root system because it allowed them access to more resources.

This is in ancient, established forests, so conditions aren’t quite the same for our young transplants. We can get some similar effects by growing fruit trees in more open settings, or riparian zones. These are zones similar to fencerows and overgrown fields where grasses are just converting to trees. These zones are iconically untidy and wild; but skillful gardeners know the elements of these zones, like clay in a potters hand, have the best potential to form the most beautiful, lush gardens.

Riparian zones have many layers, with notably high numbers of low growing herbaceous and woody shrubs, many of which are nitrogen fixers. The quickest way to simulate this ecology is making ‘guilds’ of plants right around your fruit trees. Here is my manual of bed building for info on quickly clearing grass without tillage. Plan on expanding these plantings every year until the beds around your trees meet. If the tree is older, and larger, the bed should extend at least a couple feet beyond its drip line.

Any guild should include at least 2 woody nitrogen fixing plants, about 5 plants that do not fix nitrogen but can be cut for mulch, such as comfrey, or a groundcover of something like mint, then several fruiting shrubs like raspberry or honeyberry, and some perennial vegetables.

This is the best method if you already have fruit trees in the ground, like our engineer friend. If you’re just planning your food forest, Robert Hart, the father of the northern food forests, recommended planting full size or standard fruit trees at recommended spacing for their size, in rows like any orchard, but then semi standard or medium trees, then dwarf trees, then shrubs, then herbaceous plants, then vines to climb and fill in the cracks between them.

I’d recommend mulching as much as you can, and planting that area with a complete planting like this. The space should be completly filled with plants, and will establish faster with less work overall.

This system gives quite attractive results that are increasingly less cost and labor than serial applications of even organic, clay-based sprays, pyrethrums and neems, let alone harsher chemicals. There is work later on, but this is of course debatable, because its mostly harvests of fruit. Sounds like pleasant work to me.

This article was originally published on Mortal Tree on 24th February 2017.

About the author: Luke Simon is garden manager for Simon Certified Organic Family Farm, and on his own time a permanent edible landscape designer in Ohio, United States. He is the author of PASSIVE Gardening and Mastering the Growing Edge. Follow him on his blog, Mortal Tree, and his Instagram @mortal_tree.

Last week this blog celebrated its third birthday. In that time I have gone from being a research scientist to working as an editor for a scientific journal and so the involvement of plants in my life has changed somewhat. Working with plants was one of my favourite parts of my old role in research and so its perhaps not surprising that I now do quite a bit of gardening in my spare time.

Until about a year ago, the extent of my gardening experience was a few herbs in pots outside and a bunch of low-maintenance houseplants. I wasn’t always very good at looking after these plants, so branching out to a whole, albeit small, garden has all been a bit of an experiment!

I’m happy to say that my gardening experiment has overall been pretty successful so far. I’ve managed to grow some edible vegetables and my garden looks much tidier and more colourful than it did when I moved in. Most importantly, now that I have an office job, I’ve really enjoyed having a good excuse to spend lots of my leisure time outside. However, my first year in the garden hasn’t been completely plain sailing as I ran into a few problems and disasters along the way. Here are the most useful lessons I have learnt along the way:

Be on the alert for pests – they WILL find your favourite plants. Last year, slugs and snails attacked my salad leaves and destroyed the marigolds I was growing. I tried out a few different methods to deter them from eating the rest of my crops and eventually settled on copper tape. Slugs and snails don’t like crawling over copper and so I could use the tape to make a pretty good barrier to defend a lot of my vegetable crops. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for my nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus), which became infested with hundreds of blackflies (a type of aphid) and withered and died soon after.

That plant support or structure might look tidy, but will it withstand the weather? I must admit that the first few structures I built to support plants were not all as robust as they should have been because I didn’t really appreciate how windy it would be in my garden. The canes holding up my tomatoes were blown over on several occasions, and the netting structure protecting my cabbages nearly flew away in a winter gale.

When digging in an overgrown patch of ground, keep an eye out for plants you might want to keep. Last year, I got a good crop of potatoes from the handful of tubers left in the vegetable patch by the previous occupants of the house. And just this week I discovered some parsnips growing amongst the grass of the overgrown allotment I’ve recently taken on with some friends. Being fairly hopeless at plant identification, I didn’t know what potato or parsnip plants looked like until I stumbled into them.

Work out what types of plants you like to grow and then grow them. I like to feel “productive” when I’m gardening, so I can spend hours tending to my vegetable patch and then forget to water my houseplants. As a result, I’ve tried to fill as much of my garden with fruit and vegetables as possible, and then used low-maintenance decorative plants to fill in the gaps and really shaded areas.

My main gardening project for this year is to work on an allotment with my friends. The plot hasn’t been cultivated in a few years so was pretty overgrown, but since we took on the tenancy a couple of months ago, we have managed to clear some parts of it and plant some soft fruit crops. Watch this space.

Some people think that because I am a plant scientist I should also know a lot about gardening. Think again. The extent of my gardening is tending to some house-plants and a few herbs outside. All of these plants are pretty low maintenance (except the parsley, which needs more regular watering). This suits me because I love having plants around, but I tend to be a bit absent-minded about watering them, so I need plants that can tolerate dry conditions, like Aloe vera or thyme.

So why am I NOT an expert gardener? In short, because I’ve not had the years of training and experience that expert gardeners have. My research in plant science uses mostly molecular and cell biology techniques. I didn’t step foot in the greenhouses at my place of work for the whole of the first year of my PhD because I never needed to grow plants in soil. Instead, I was growing plants in sterile conditions (i.e. without microbes like bacteria and fungi) on a jelly-like substance called agar. Continue reading →